Hello my friends,

As one who follows the Revised Common Lectionary for preaching, I am always so inspired and amazed at how the assigned scripture readings for each Sunday are so timely and speak directly into our moment. The lectionary assigned gospel reading for All Saints Sunday (November 2nd) is Luke 6:20-31. More commonly known as Jesus' "sermon on the plain." He speaks directly about those who are poor and hungry as well as delivers stern warnings to the rich and comfortable. With everything happening around SNAP and healthcare in our country, I thought it would be important to deeply reflect on the heart and context of Jesus' words in this passage as we seek to navigate our own context in the days ahead together.

Recommended Resources

-Common Myths About SNAP & Poverty In America. With all the misinformation swirling around online about SNAP and the many myths about poverty that came before them, I compiled this short list responding to those common myths and the facts and resources that refute them. I hope you find it helpful.

-"The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat.” After hearing 2 Thessalonians 3:10 taken out of context and misused so many times, especially in defense of indifference to the poor, I wrote this short commentary and response. I share it here in case you find it helpful.

-Reframing the Battle of Wills by Hidden Brain Podcast. I found this conversation about discussing conflict and how we go about changing people's minds to be so rich and helpful. I think this could be a really helpful resource for your conversations in our current moment.

-Poverty, by America By Matthew Desmond. You may have already read this book, but if you haven't, I highly recommend it. It is one of the most insightful and clear pictures of poverty in America I've ever read.

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"Blessed are you who hunger, for you will be satisfied."

Luke 6:20-31

Looking at his disciples, he said:

“Blessed are you who are poor,
for yours is the kingdom of God.

Blessed are you who hunger now,
for you will be satisfied.
Blessed are you who weep now,
for you will laugh.

Blessed are you when people hate you,
when they exclude you and insult you
and reject your name as evil,
because of the Son of Man.

“Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, because great is your reward in heaven. For that is how their ancestors treated the prophets.

“But woe to you who are rich,
for you have already received your comfort.

Woe to you who are well fed now,
for you will go hungry.
Woe to you who laugh now,
for you will mourn and weep.

Woe to you when everyone speaks well of you,
for that is how their ancestors treated the false prophets.

“But to you who are listening I say: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you. If someone slaps you on one cheek, turn to them the other also. If someone takes your coat, do not withhold your shirt from them. Give to everyone who asks you, and if anyone takes what belongs to you, do not demand it back. Do to others as you would have them do to you.

All Saints Sunday

On November 2nd, Christians all over the world will gather for All Saints Sunday, observing and remembering the cloud of witnesses in the past. In my ministry, this Sunday was always a special time to remember those from our congregation that we had lost to death since last All Saints Sunday. It is a time when the church is called to remember and honor those who lived quietly and loudly for the gospel, those who were fed by mercy and those who gave their lives for justice.

Among the saints who lived this vision, I believe Dorothy Day stands as a luminous example. Living through the Great Depression, she refused to separate faith from the material conditions of the poor. With Peter Maurin, she co-founded the Catholic Worker Movement, creating houses of hospitality where the hungry were fed and the homeless welcomed, not as charity, but as an act of resistance to systems that had forgotten mercy. She opposed war, refused to sanctify capitalism’s cruelties, and saw Christ’s face in every person the world dismissed. Her activism, steeped in the beatitudes we just read, was both tender and fierce: she could love her enemies without excusing the harm they caused, praying for those in power while tirelessly opposing their unjust actions. Dorothy Day’s life remains a witness that the way of Jesus is never merely spiritual, it is political in the truest sense: it concerns how we live together, who eats, who is seen, and who is free.

One of her most memorable quotes she is remembered by is “The Gospel takes away our right forever, to discriminate between the deserving and the undeserving poor.” In our time when the opposite seems to be presented as synonymous with Christian faith in our culture, this is such a needed and prophetic reminder. It is the witness of grace. Unmerited favor.

Such is the witness of the kingdom of God.

The Context Behind The Text

In first-century Palestine, where Jesus was delivering this message, the vast majority of people were poor peasants living under crushing economic pressure. Many scholars suggest that around 90% of the population lived at or below subsistence level. They worked small plots of land, fished, herded animals, or labored as artisans, often just trying to survive from day to day.

Roman rule imposed heavy taxation on everything, land, crops, trade, and even people. Taxes were collected through a corrupt system of tax farming, where local middlemen (like the tax collectors mentioned throughout the Gospels) paid Rome upfront and then squeezed as much as they could from ordinary people to make a profit.

When people couldn’t pay, they lost their land, their inheritance, their means of survival. These lands were often absorbed by wealthy elites and absentee landlords, creating a growing class of landless peasants. Many were forced into debt slavery or became day laborers, which is one reason Jesus’ parables so often involve debt, wages, and absentee landowners (e.g., Matthew 20:1–16, Luke 16:19–31).

So, when Jesus says, “Blessed are you who are poor,” he isn’t speaking metaphorically. He is speaking directly to the lived experience of people who were truly hungry, who had been economically dispossessed, and who lived under the crushing weight of empire and exploitation. His words were not “spiritual platitudes” but a radical declaration of divine solidarity with the oppressed.

Sermon On The Plain

Unlike the mount Mathew tells us Jesus delivered the beatitudes from in his gospel, Luke places Jesus on a plain, which I have always found profound. While there is powerful symbolism and significance for Jesus to deliver this sermon from a mount, harkening back to Moses receiving and delivering the Ten Commandments from a mount, there is also something deeply humble and equalizing about Jesus standing face to face, on equal footing with those who are listening to him speak these words.

What is so profound about these beatitudes, both in Matthew and here in Luke, is that they are the center of how Jesus believes the kingdom of God operates. They are the blueprints of how Jesus believes people who are part of God’s kingdom should live out their lives. They are what Jesus believes to be the fruits of a community walking in step with God should look like. It is a sermon for real people on a level place that directly impacts their here and now.

All throughout In Luke’s Gospel, he shows how God’s kingdom often breaks into the present through Jesus. How healing, welcoming, and release happen “today.” Notice how Jesus also speaks directly, in the second person: this is about you who listen, you who live it. The kingdom of God is not just something we experience after we die; it is a disruptive presence that begins to reorder our life now. Today.

It is a radical reordering of life for the community of God to work towards, a reality where the poor are blessed, the hungry are filled, and those who are mourning are filled with laughter. Where those who profit from and exploit the current status quo will have their positions reversed and turned upside down. This is also a continued theme all throughout Luke’s Gospel, which repeatedly enacts these reversals in story and parable (think Lazarus and the rich man, Mary’s prophetic song in Luke 1). God’s reign lifts up what the world discards. God’s justice reverses the exploitations that leave some full while others starve.

False Prophets & True Prophets

When Jesus warns about false prophets in this sermon (Luke 6:43–45; cf. Matthew 7:15–20), he’s not talking about fortune-tellers or people predicting the end times. He’s talking about leaders who use the language of faith but bear the fruit of domination, greed, and exclusion. “You will know them by their fruits,” he says, not by their charisma or association with with wealthy and powerful, but by what their lives and movements produce in the world. Do they bring healing, reconciliation, and mercy? Do they lift up the poor and powerless? Or do they sow fear, contempt, and division? Do they maintain the current status quo or do they speak truth to its power? In Jesus’ kingdom, the authenticity of faith is measured not by how loudly we defend our beliefs but by how deeply we love our neighbor, especially those our ideologies would prefer to leave behind.

This distinction between true and false prophets is central to Jesus’ ethic of the kingdom. The kingdom of God is not advanced by coercion or purity tests but by compassion and justice. It moves quietly, like yeast in dough or a seed in soil, transforming from within. False prophets promise glory, wealth, and power, while true prophets embody humility and mercy. False prophets demand allegiance to their vision of righteousness and to those in power, while true prophets reveal the heart of God, who lifts the lowly and fills the hungry with good things. Jesus calls his followers to discern not only the words of others but the fruits of their own lives, to ask whether our faith is producing love or simply protecting our own comfort and control.

Love Your Enemies

If this ethic wasn’t challenging enough as it is, it becomes all the more radical with Jesus’ call to "love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, lend without expecting return, offer the other cheek, give your coat as well as your shirt" (6:27–31).

This call stretches far beyond mere personal grievance. It confronts us with the scandal of grace in the face of systemic harm. It is one thing to forgive someone who has wronged us; it is another to love those who deliberately manipulate hunger, who profit from cruelty, and who wield power to the detriment of the weak. Jesus does not ask us to feel affection for such acts of evil. He asks us to resist hatred’s corrosion of our souls, to refuse to become what we oppose, even in the name of our opposition.

Loving our enemies means holding onto their humanity even as we confront their injustice. It means praying for their repentance, not for their destruction. It is a discipline of heart that keeps our protest from turning into vengeance, and our truth-telling from becoming dehumanizing in return. This love does not silence our anger; it sanctifies it into compassion driven courage. It keeps our resistance grounded in mercy rather than fear.

To love in this way is not weakness, it is the strength of the prophets and saints. It is the courage of Martin Luther King Jr. praying for his oppressors while marching for freedom; of Archbishop Desmond Tutu forgiving those who upheld apartheid while insisting on justice; of Dorothy Day feeding those who cursed her pacifism. It is the fierce love that drove Jesus to bless the poor, rebuke the powerful, and even forgive the executioners who nailed him to the cross.

This is nonviolent, countercultural resistance is what the kingdom of God looks like too. It is not passivity in the face of abuse, but a way of refusing the logic of retaliation and reciprocity even under threat. It disarms the systems of honor and domination propped up by the current status quo that justify violence and exclusion.

The Beatitudes Today

We read this passage on All Saints Sunday because it names the pattern of God’s people across the ages: saints and prophets who fed the hungry, welcomed strangers, resisted imperial violence, spoke truth to power, and held on to a hope that God’s justice would one day, and even now, undermine empires that depend on greed, exploitation, and domination.

That hope is just as needed today.

Today, the beatitudes confront us with a blunt moral test. Right now, as I write this, federal food assistance (SNAP) is at risk because of a political standoff. Millions of households could see benefits halt beginning of November unless Congress acts (and states and courts scramble to respond).

Advocates and some state attorneys general have described government and agency choices as withholding funds that would keep benefits flowing; others report the administration has declined calls to use contingency funds to cover SNAP for November while the political gridlock continues. Lawsuits have been filed and governors have issued emergencies in expectation of disruption to food assistance. All while many continue to advocate and even celebrate the ending of government assistance as a good thing.

This is not abstract. This is our reality. This is the kind of reality Jesus speaks into through his sermon on the plain. From the poor, the hungry, the mourning, to the rich, the well fed, and the laughing. For many families, veterans, disabled individuals, and those working multiple jobs and still not being able to get by because of such low wages, SNAP is the difference between shame and dignity, between being able to put food on the table and the hollow terror of not knowing where the next meal will come from. The political choices we now witness, bargaining over fundamental needs, pressing for legislative concessions that would reshape health care and welfare in ways critics call deep cuts and harmful to low income families, mean that hungry people are becoming leverage points in a partisan standoff. Reports show the shutdown negotiating posture includes demands about major health-care and budget changes; where the health and welfare of human beings are being made pawns in a political game

Jesus’ sermon speaks to this exact reality. He does not give a theology that blesses the powerful who exploits hunger; he blesses the poor and warns the comfortable. He announces that God’s justice is not indifferent to empty bowls or to children sent to school hungry. Were Jesus to preach on our politics today, he would not applaud a policy debate that uses the hungry as bargaining chips. He would call it what it is: a violation of neighbor-love and an affront to the God who identifies with the poor. Especially when it is done by those who claim to worship God.

We must name what Jesus names: his kingdom’s measure is the care for the least among us. The moral vocabulary of “Christian values” on the lips of those in power utterly collapses if it does not first heed these beatitudes. If a government or leader claims Jesus while enabling or exploiting hunger and sickness, we must call that as the hypocrisy it is. Our calling is prophetic: to speak the truth, to comfort the afflicted, and to challenge systems and politics that dehumanize.

Our call is to bless the poor. Bless the hungry. Bless the mourning.

Our call is to challenge the profiteers. Challenge the comfortable. Challenge those who laugh at and celebrate the misfortune of others.

Our call is to love our enemies. Hold onto their humanity. Do not let hate define our hearts. Resist turning to vengeance as we persist in nonviolent resistance.

Our call is to move instep with the radical recording of God’s kingdom, breaking in here and now.

Practical Steps Rooted in Jesus' Teaching

• Pray and mourn, but do not stop there. Jesus places blessing and lament together. The church’s prayer must be matched by action. Others the mourning will not be comforted.
• Feed people now. Support local food banks, meal programs, and mutual aid efforts in your area. If SNAP pauses, local networks will be a lifeline.
• Advocate without retreating into partisanship. Call your representatives and ask them to protect nutrition assistance and to negotiate without using human need as leverage.
• Hold leaders accountable in moral terms. Use your voice to insist that faith and policy be judged by how they treat the hungry, the sick, and the vulnerable.
• Support legal and civic responses. Many state attorneys general, advocacy groups, and legal coalitions are mobilizing to protect benefits; support them and pay attention to court updates.
• Practice Luke’s ethic in everyday life. Love enemies and bless those who curse you, meaning, refuse demonization, refuse to accept scapegoating as inevitable. Speak truth to fear: share facts, share stories, and insist on the human reality behind every policy debate.

A prophetic Christian posture is not mere outrage; it is steady presence. It looks like feeding a neighbor while also calling senators to account; it looks like lament for broken systems while building alternatives that embody the kingdom now.

A Final Note

Jesus reversals do not promise earthly revenge, rather, they promise that God sees and will act. Our vocation is to act now in hope, which is subversive. A hope that serves the poor and undermines the old empires of greed. The beatitudes call us to risk, to love where it is costly, to testify where it is unpopular, and to serve where power would rather we be silent.

So, on this All Saints Sunday, as the church remembers those who lived and died with the Gospel’s reversals, let us be counted among those who feed, who protest nonviolently, who speak truth to power, and who refuse to let our politics become a market where people’s lives are traded for policy wins.

A Closing Prayer

O God of the poor and the tender-hearted,
you who lifted up the lowly and filled the hungry with good,
open our eyes to the faces behind the headlines.
Forgive us when our words bless policy over people,
when our fear wears the mask of piety,
when our silence compounds the hunger of our neighbors.
Give us the stubborn courage of your Son:
to pray without ceasing,
to feed without counting cost,
to speak without fear,
and to love even the ones who oppose us.
Turn the hearts of leaders toward justice,
and grant wisdom to those who govern.
Teach us to hold our nation and its promises lightly enough
to hold human life with holy tenderness.
May your kingdom come in our streets, our halls of power,
and at every kitchen table now emptied of bread.
In the name of the One who became poor for us,
Jesus the Christ. Amen.

Now I'd like to hear from you! Did you find this helpful? What thoughts came to your mind as you read? Feel free to respond to this email and share your thoughts with me. I look forward to reading them. A 30 Day Devotional: I recently wrote a daily devotional in hopes to provide a companion for people seeking to follow Jesus in our world today. You can read more about it here: $20.00 Following Jesus In A World Obsessed With Empires: 30 Days of reclaiming the hope, compassion, and justice of Jesus. Today, our world can often feel overwhelmed by darkness, division, and despair. I created this 30-day devotional to... Read more Get it now! ​ Ways to support: If you'd like to support this project, you can do so through one-time-gift of any amount you feel is right. You can also subscribe through a $5/mo, $15/mo, or $25/mo. Several others have also asked for a recurring gift option that is different from the ones offered here, like this one. If you'd like me to set up a different option for you, please just send me an email with the word "support" in the subject line. As always, I really want to thank all of you for reading and for all the ways you support me and this project every single week. I'm thankful for the ways we are building this together and hope it creates a lasting, positive change in our world along the way! I sincerely appreciate you all, Ben Remember, you can now view this and all previous newsletters as well as invite friends to join through this link: https://benjamin-cremer.ck.page/profile.

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